“Drag Queens Ain’t Supposed to Be in Places Like This”: RuPaul’s DragCon, Bushwig, and the Old New York Drag Culture

The younger generation was everywhere at the weekend spectacular for a new drag-queen era: the inaugural RuPaul’s DragCon N.Y.C. 2017.

Photograph by Santiago Felipe / Getty

In 1967, at the Miss All-America Camp Beauty pageant, drag queens such as Flawless Sabrina and Crystal LaBeija strutted in finery down the stage at Manhattan’s Town Hall before a panel of judges that included Andy Warhol. It was two years before drag queens like Marsha P. Johnson would lead the Stonewall riots and spark the gay-rights movement, and more than two decades before the movie “Paris Is Burning” would immortalize the drag balls at Sally’s II, in Times Square. The Miss All-America contestants served looks. They served drama. A documentary made about the pageant, the 1968 cult classic “The Queen,” captured it all on film. Mostly, though, like drag queens before them, they lived and performed in the shadows.

On a hot Friday evening this September, a corps of queens returned to the Town Hall stage to kick off a weekend spectacular for a new drag-queen era: the inaugural RuPaul’s DragCon N.Y.C. 2017. The event is an East Coast iteration of a trade show that began in Los Angeles, in 2015, exploiting the success of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” the reality-TV competition that has aired on the gay channel Logo since 2009. More than a hundred queens have been contestants on the show; fans have bought the merch and watched the endless YouTube spinoffs and tours. Last spring, VH1 picked up the series. Now competitors from the show such as Bob the Drag Queen, the winner of Season 8, walked onstage to a high-pitched roar from the largely young, white, and female audience. It was a crowd that would never have set foot in a place like Sally’s II—or, truthfully, have been welcome there.

“We are in a very classy turnout. ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ has changed the game,” Bob told the crowd. “Drag queens ain’t supposed to be in places like this. . . . Like, we should be performing in McDonald’s, in Times Square.”

Attendees at RuPaul’s DragCon N.Y.C. 2017.

Photograph by Santiago Felipe / Getty

An attendee at RuPaul’s DragCon N.Y.C. 2017.

Photograph by Santiago Felipe / Getty

An attendee at RuPaul’s DragCon N.Y.C. 2017.

Photograph by Santiago Felipe / Getty

An attendee at RuPaul’s DragCon N.Y.C. 2017.

Photograph by Santiago Felipe / Getty

An attendee at RuPaul’s DragCon N.Y.C. 2017.

Photograph by Santiago Felipe / Getty

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Attendees at RuPaul’s DragCon N.Y.C. 2017.

Photograph by Santiago Felipe / Getty

Instead, dozens of former “Drag Race” contestants spent the weekend within the cavernous yet claustrophobic confines of the Jacob Javits Center, where the main DragCon events were held. Thirty-five thousand people attended. Weekend passes started at sixty dollars. As fans endured waits of more than six hours to enter RuPaul’s perfumed tent and get a customized photo, queens sat for panels on makeup and activism, competed in amateur catwalk-offs, and sold T-shirts inside art-directed cubicles. Here was Season 8’s makeup whiz Kim Chi posing in a cumulous cloud of a wig before a 3-D vista of miniature hot-air balloons; there, Season 5’s fashion plate Detox reclined within an acrylic neon bathtub. “It looks more comfortable than it is,” she said. “I have the worst kink in my neck.”

A different kind of kink could be found deeper inside the center, past the vendors of tiaras and novelty contact lenses and a booth occupied by a gay psychic, at the intersection of Glamazon Boulevard and Sickening Street. There, across from a Manic Panic hair-dye booth, the Pleasure Chest flogged sex toys inside an adults-only tent. The personal-lubricant brand Boy Butter unloaded product out in the open on neighboring Stacy Layne Lane, named after the Season 3 fan favorite, and not just to the usual suspects but also to a mom shopping for her gay teen-age sons. Stationed at a mobbed booth nearby, wearing a smart wrap dress and oversized silver-sequined glasses, Michelle Visage, the “Drag Race” co-host and den mother, said that she had to explain the lube to her daughters. “I just told them the truth!” she laughed. “Living in a fantasy is not going to help the younger generation.”

The younger generation was everywhere at DragCon. “I wanted to see princesses,” a five-year-old named Haley exclaimed, and Season 4’s villainous Phi Phi O’Hara won her over by giving her a Poké Ball. Other kids chose not to dream it but be it, flaunting made-up faces and dresses that Crystal LaBeija could only dream of. An eight-year-old drag queen named Lactacia got a makeover from Season 7’s Ginger Minj, who was dressed as Snow White. A ten-year-old queen named Desmond Is Amazing cut the DragCon ribbon with RuPaul herself.

If, before “Drag Race,” queens were court jesters (and sex workers, and criminals), today many are brands and brand ambassadors, social-media stars and spokespeople. At DragCon, they sold themselves among family-friendly cat toys and red-lace jockstraps and child-size wigs. (The wigs, Season 1’s crazy-like-a-fox Tammie Brown noted, are made of synthetic material, “so that’s a real environmental issue.”) The fans’ squealing enthusiasm made the Javits Center feel, at times, like a petting zoo. The convention organizers posted signs reading “Drag is not consent! If you would like a photo, always ask first and respect that person’s right to say no!”

Does the old drag culture get erased as a new whitewashed, family-friendly generation is made? “ ‘Drag Race’ is an extension of ballroom culture. People think it’s the other way around,” Mariah Balenciaga, who appeared on Season 3, told me. The actor and “Drag Race” judge Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman pointed out the tension between “Drag Race” ’s multiracial cast and its increasingly white audience. “The sole reason I’m here is because I saw a void of queer voices and black bodies,” he said. Season 9’s Peppermint, a beloved New York night-life fixture and also the first person to enter the competition as an out trans woman, noted that biological and trans women are only gradually becoming welcomed into drag culture. “Drag is not the last time a woman will hear she can’t do something a man is doing,” she said.

But many of the performers were optimistic about what DragCon N.Y.C. represented. “Young people are taking drag more seriously because they want to be on ‘Drag Race,’ ” the trans night-life icon Amanda Lepore told me. “That’s great. I love to see it.” Fran Tirado, the host of the multiracial queer podcast “Food 4 Thot,” told me, “I know people can get mad about appropriation and using gay men as props, and that’s a real thing. But a convention dedicated to consuming queer culture is what’s bringing us to the next step, which is us becoming the people who are including, rather than being included.” The only downside, according to a ninety-one-year-old DragCon attendee in a smart pantsuit and wheelchair: “I didn’t see any dicks.”

She could have seen plenty two weekends later, at DragCon’s grittier, more chaotic sister, the Bushwig festival, in Queens. Launched in 2012, in Brooklyn’s infamous Secret Project Robot space, and this year housed in Queens’ spiffy and sprawling Knockdown Center, Bushwig presented more queens in two days than “Drag Race” has in its entire history—all for the delectation of rowdy, decidedly adult crowd members, some of whom were in drag themselves and many of whom were barely dressed at all. By late Saturday afternoon, folding tables near security were littered with confiscated mini bottles of vodka and poppers. T-shirts for sale read “PUNCH MY COLON.” Temperatures hit ninety degrees, and the underground but up-and-coming drag kings and bio queens and performance artists and burlesque babes and all the others became hot and bothered. A few slammed Trump. The local drag favorite Harajuku Queen did pickle tricks. The trans performer Charlene was nude but for a boa and more charisma than most queens have gowns.

“When I think about seventies gay culture,” the thirty-six-year-old filmmaker and queer gadabout Adam Baran told me, “these are the kinds of events I imagine I’d be going to.”